“America’s the richest country on Earth because we’ve been able to put capital together and we’ve been able to make our poor somewhat the envy of the world....If you go to India or you go to any number of third-world countries... you have greater inequality of income and wealth (and) less opportunity for people to rise from the have-not to the have.”
So said Congress’ wealthiest member, Darrell Issa (R-CA), who made his almost half a billion fortune by selling auto theft products, last week on CNN. This sort of statement is not particularly surprising to anyone who has stopped over at Fox News every once in a while -- though it is an ironic time to be talking about how America’s poor are the envy of the world, so soon after the Baltimore protests.
Issa’s words are very typical of a wealthy Republican, who generally imagine the American poor as lazy moochers who had the same opportunity, but blew it -- and now live lavishly off of government assistance. But what is especially irritating is his comparison of the American poor to the poor in third-world countries, rather than the those in other industrialized nations. Why set the bar so low for poverty? What happened to America being exceptional? After all, folks on the right are the ones who see America as some kind of “shining city on a hill,” perched up above everyone else.
Maybe it is because American exceptionalism is more of a dream than a reality, and Republicans like Issa have to compare our poor to third world countries to keep the idea of exceptionalism alive. Surely the fact that the poor in other developed nations are much better off than the American poor has something to do with it. Indeed, according to data compiled by Matt Bruenig at Demos, America’s poor are not so exceptional when compared to other developed nations. Ranked in how much disposable income individuals in the bottom half of economic distribution have, America was 13th in the bottom 10th percentile and 11th in the bottom 20th percentile, behind the likes of Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Canada, and so on.
The American middle class also falls well behind other developed nations -- ranked 19th in median net worth, behind Australia, Japan, and most of Western Europe. On the other hand, Americas wealthiest have certainly done exceptional over the past few decades. As Thomas Piketty documented in his book, “Capital In the Twenty-first Century,” the top one percent in the United States have gained an increasingly large share of the wealth, while the share of wealth for Europe's one percent has significantly declined since the start of the twentieth century. As of 2010, the top one percent owned about 35% of wealth in America, while Europe's top centile owned 25%, down from over 60% in 1910.
These numbers quite clearly show that America’s poor and middle classes have become unexceptional when compared to other developed nations. So what do Republican’s do? They compare our poor to the poor in countries like India, to keep our exceptionalism alive.
This may convince some people that the American poor are doing just fine, that they live better than those in India; but it is certainly no comfort to the people actually suffering in the streets of Detroit or Baltimore or any other American city where poverty is an epidemic.
And this is a crucial point that should be realized from the Baltimore protests -- that class and poverty are today just as big a problem, if not bigger in certain areas of the country, as race. Baltimore is a city with a black Mayor and a black police commissioner with a force that is half black, and many Baltimoreans seem to agree that
this is more about class than anything else. “It ain't no race thing — it's not a race thing at all,” Taiwan Parker, a resident of Freddy Gray’s neighborhood, told an NPR reporter.
Indeed, as in many cities and counties around the country, Baltimore and its surrounding suburbs are separated by class, not race. As President Obama said recently: “What used to be racial segregation now mirrors itself in class segregation.” This is also true in considerably well off cities, like Manhattan, where the top 5 percent of households earned 88 times as much as the bottom 20 percent in 2013, giving it the largest dollar income gap in the country. In an excellent editorial, Farah Stockman writes in the Boston Globe:
“Maryland, home of the largest free black population during slavery, now hosts five of the nation’s top 10 wealthiest black suburbs. Meanwhile, the poor blacks left behind in places like West Baltimore are in many ways more economically and socially isolated than their counterparts were a century ago. That’s the fallacy of the slogan ‘black lives matter.’ We know Obama’s life matters. We know Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s life matters. We know Oprah’s life matters. It’s the lives of the poor that we forget — until they riot.”
Concentrated poverty and disastrous policies, like the aggressive war on drugs, have made life for poor American’s hopeless, and in many cases, “nasty, brutish, and short.” The truth is that we should not be comparing our poor to those in third world countries, or even to those in Europe -- we should be comparing our poor to our rich. Since Forbes first published its “World’s Billionaires” list, it has gone from 140 billionaires in 1987, to 1,645 today. Thats a lot of growth for a billionaires club. What about everyone else? What about the shrinking middle class and the children growing up in West Baltimore? Have we lowered ourselves to saying that they’re better off than those in the slums of India? The protests in Baltimore revealed a growing anger within the lower class community, and the disconnect shown by Darrell Issa and his ilk explain why so many people are beginning to get fed up.